Setting Boundaries

My new-mother friends are in partial disbelief when I tell them that I've succeeded in setting certain boundaries for my son. They look at me dubiously, as if a 13-month-old child couldn't possibly understand what boundaries are.

In an earlier post (maybe a couple months ago), I mentioned that I was told, by someone who made a career out of child development education, that a parent can set very few boundaries for a young toddler; the best strategy, this person said, is to eliminate the need to set boundaries (by locking down the toilet lid, for example, or removing the valuable object that you don't want your child to break). While I agree in principle with that idea, I do think that some boundaries have to be set. And I've seen that those boundaries are respected by the child IF the parent sets them patiently and consistently.

It's difficult, because while you're busy setting new boundaries, your child is busy developing on multiple levels: motor skills that seem to increase with the velocity of a jet engine (yet still leave him extremely vulnerable); a curiosity like a raging wildfire; cognitive reasoning abilities that advance with leaps and bounds every day, even if they remain brutally limited by adult standards; greater independence coupled with bouts of sudden insecurity, and so forth. Your child will test all your limits in ways you could not imagine him achieving just a few weeks earlier--and create reasons for new limits on an almost-daily basis.

In fact, I don't think it's good to try to set too many limits in a short period of time; one has to choose one's battles. Just today, my babysitter (who is excellent; I've blogged about her before but not often enough) told me that she is not letting my son throw food off his tray onto the floor, touch the TV set, or touch the stereo. She's a much better boundary-setter than I am; I like what she's doing, but I might only implement boundary number one (it has become a major inconvenience to clean up after him when he finishes eating). I just don't want to fight my child every time he walks over to the readily available TV screen or the stereo--not yet, anyway. I'd rather do what I eventually did with my computer--keep those objects out of his reach.

But even as I make these decisions to set more boundaries, he's adding more behaviors that need to be addressed. I won't give details about those behaviors (I'm still trying, in this blog, to protect his privacy as much as possible, by not revealing too much personal information about him). Suffice it to say that I realize fully how challenging toddlers can become. But I also believe that as his physical and intellectual skills mature, so do his emotional skills, such that he becomes more and more capable of understanding what "crossing the line" means, every single day. It's up to us as parents, I suppose, to make very clear where that line is.